The rapid pace of suburbanization has produced wheat shot transportation impacts on low income and minority communities. These include poor access to suburban job locations, disproportionate share of air and noise pollution, and inadequate service levels. Lack of information on these impacts has been in impeded the investment of these communities in transportation decision-making. Accordingly, the proposed Phase 1 research will identify preliminary "best practices" for public involvement and communications strategies to insure that target communities have adequate information on impacts to allow them to participate effectively in the public planning process. The proposed research will identify factors that have impeded progress in information dissemination, explore directions for improvement, and specify strategies designed to break new ground in this area. The Phase I report will summarize the case analyses, narrowing the field of potential best practices to produce Target Strategies keyed to two particular local conditions. The Target Strategies would be those that hold the most promise for continued research and refinement in the process or creating the guidance framework as described in the proposal. This will set the stage for more exhaustive research to be carried out during Phase 2,leading to the development over operationally useful Best Practices Framework. Anticipated results and
Potential Commercial Applications: The Phase 1 research results will lay the groundwork for creating a key source to serve the public participation and community development objectives of a wide variety of agencies and community-based organizations. Many government agencies are continually in the process of developing public involvement guidance documents for specific projects and will benefit substantially from a unified framework that identifies Best Practices under various local circumstances. The results could also be applied to enhance and update NEJ AC's Model Plan for Participation, 1996, with special emphasis on transportation planning, a decision-making, and service issues.
Keywords: Environmental justice, Public involvement best practices, The under-represented communities.
